Foreign aid: Britain gives China nearly £400 MILLION despite being world's second biggest economy
Andrew Mitchell has promised to stop sending aid to China
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Britain has given China nearly £400million in foreign aid since 2010, new research reveals.
Figures from the House of Commons Library indicate the UK Government has continued to provide financial aid to the communist state despite a GDP of over $19trillion - the second highest in the world.
Ministers, backbenchers and campaign groups have continually condemned sending aid to the authoritarian country, citing human rights abuses against religious and ethnic minorities and political dissidents.
Direct aid to the Chinese government was brought to a halt in 2010 when International Development Minister Andrew Mitchell pledged to put a stop to taxpayers’ money being sent to China.
The minister says he remains committed to ending aid to the world's second largest economy
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However, financial packages have continued to be provided reaching a peak of £68million in 2019 alone.
The aid was reportedly aimed at tackling climate change, stimulating economic prosperity and addressing human rights abuses.
But, with China the world’s top polluter that year, emitting more CO2 than the next four combined, and human rights organisations reporting an increase in repression and systematic abuses against citizens that year questions have been raised about the efficacy of aid payments.
The persecution and imprisonment of Uyghurs and other minorities since 2017 are widely considered to amount to crimes against humanity, and the legislatively enshrined suppression of public liberties across Hong Kong has pushed China up to the top three state offenders on human rights globally.
Later today, Lindy Cameron, head of the National Cyber Security Centre, is poised to deliver a speech at the CyberUK conference in Belfast declaring China poses an “epoch-defining” challenge due to its rise as a “technology superpower.”
Despite the rapid development of China’s economy over the last decade and the introduction of Chinese foreign aid schemes, the UK continues to pay tens of millions of pounds to the hostile state for economic and environmental improvements.
The Conservative Government has reaffirmed its commitment to bring UK aid to China to an end, over a decade after it first pledged to do so.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is coming under increasing pressure from senior members of his own party, not least his immediate predecessor Liz Truss, to take a firmer stance against China for the UK’s national security and geo-political strategies moving forward.
Luke de Pulford, Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China said: "It makes no sense for the UK to be funnelling aid money into China when Beijing is spending hundreds of millions in development aid themselves.
The UK should not be subsidising Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative with our own depleted resources.
Moreover, there are worrying signs that state authorities in China have used our aid to facilitate the persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.
We need a wholesale review of this insanity, which has won the UK very little in soft power terms, but hit the UK taxpayer hard.”
A FCDO spokesperson said:
“No aid has been sent to the Chinese Government since 2011 and we have cut Overseas Development Aid funded programmes in China by 95% since the 2021 financial year.“The remaining ODA is limited to supporting projects focused on promoting the UK’s interests and values.”